Swindler Ailing

March 21, 1986

VOGHERA, ITALY — Michele Sindona, a former Vatican financial adviser and mastermind of the largest bank failure in U.S. history, became comatose in his prison cell Thursday and was hospitalized. Doctors, who said there were indications he took poison, said it was irreversible. Sindona, 65, was given the last rites of the Catholic Church. He was sentenced Tuesday to life imprisonment for paying to have an attorney assassinated in 1979. Sindona was an adviser to the Vatican bank in the 1970s when it is rumored to have lost between $46 million and $200 million. Sindona was sentenced to 25 years in prison in New York state in 1980 on fraud charges in the collapse of the Franklin National Bank. The United State extradited Sindona to Italy.